Sunday, October 27, 2013

Two notes for Sunday: on Social Security and XE

- by New Deal democrat

It's Sunday, so you know what that means: I get to say whatever I want.

First, a note on XE.com. I know posting has been light here for a couple of weeks, but that has more to do with the government shutdown and lack of data than with Bonddad and me being elsewhere. I expect posting to ramp back up somewhat starting this week.

If you've followed our links over to XE, you know that the format is a little clunky. We can't crosspost in both places, but as we said when we told you we had landed paying gigs, we absolutely want you to be able to follow us, so we've been posting links to make it easy for you. XE intends to improve the format, probably by establishing a separate "blog" header at the top of their home page. They also want to give us more functionality with graphs and hyperlinks. It's a work in progress, and it should improve over the next few months. And, by the way, in case you didn't click over yet, in this week's "Weekly Indicators" column we find out that somebody on the President's Council of Economic Advisors apparently knows of or reads the column, because they adopted an almost identical format with the same name, "Weekly Indicators," to report data during the government shutdown.

Also, nothing makes me go so berserk as talks of grand bargaining away Social Security. I've been working on a Democrat-only, no GOP compromise desired, no-catfood plan to keep the Social Security trust fund solvent forever - and I do mean, so long as the USA exists. Crucially, it relies on automatic triggers that kick in both if the program is overfunded and underfunded - so, for example, withhholding taxes can automatically go down, and benefits be increased, under this plan. There is never, and I do mean never, a need for further Congressional legislation. The plan takes Social Security off the table not just for Boomers and X'ers, but Millenials -- and the grandchildren of Millenials when that time comes as well.

I had hoped to have the post ready for today, but it's going to take at least one more week. Stay tuned.